Some Are Sad, But Most Are Sour
by The Hart and Hound
Summary: It’s been five days without nutrition. [Preseries. ViciousSpike.]


Title: Some Are Sad, But Most Are Sour (1/1)

Author: tsubaki-hana

Series: Cowboy Bebop

Rating: M

Disclaimer: Cowboy Bebop belongs to someone other than me.

Summary: It's been five days without nutrition. Pre-series. Vicious/Spike

* * *

He lies in his bed

But his mechanic heart is tickin'

He's been there for days

The robot has got the blues.

* * *

01

Spike Spiegel has always been exceptionally careful of where he leaves his gun, which is to say that he never takes it off his person at all. He does not like to say that he is afraid that he will be caught unarmed so much as he would like to say that he'll be ready to start shit with a local gang at a moment's notice. If his partner knows otherwise, he says nothing, but calls him several names while they drive off in a dated town car. (_They know the value of silence in this world of men, where Spike can imagine a soft voice and feminine gentleness being gutted in an instance, left like a slut in the gutter rat kingdom. And see now! How the golden tresses cluster and clump into oily minarets for a crown. All hail her majesty, honesty_.)

"You're such a skittish bastard," Vicious tells him, smirking at Spike when he turns his own mouth into a grin, checking the gunmetal in his pocket.

"And you're so different, Sonny Chiba? Last I checked, it wasn't legal to carry live blades on your person in public."

"Who the fuck is Sonny Chiba?" asks Vicious.

"That samurai on that kung-fu show they re-run on channel 6!" says Spike, and for a moment the cab of the car smells of stale beer and sweat from sitting too long without air conditioning. Vicious should know, he thinks. He was there (_as though this should account for everything_.) "You know, the old one with the rainbow lighting effects and cliches," he adds with a twist of his hands and a dramatized karate move.

"That old thing? From the _80's_?"

Spike laughs. "Ah! So you do remember that afternoon. If I recall correctly, you were the one who put it on that channel to begin with."

Vicious scoffs in his usual manner. "For the _news_."

"Well that's even gayer than before, but either way, you were still there." ( _You were there, you were there, you were there. Maybe if you say it enough times, even now, he'll be able to answer because he was __**there**__ too_.)

* * *

02

They're back to back again, underneath a lamp but not because they are in a stickup. This isn't an old western movie, and neither of them are heroes. But, however, Spike has a leg injury like any good cowboy should have, and Vicious is out of ammo and out of cell minutes for now, so they wait until Spike is well enough to move again.

"If you'd just listen to me, you wouldn't get shot at as much as you do," says Vicious, and he is already ripping fabric from the bottom of his second-hand coat to make something to wrap Spike's leg in until they can get home again (_home being a hovel of an apartment that smells like someone died in it, which isn't entirely false_).

Spike winces, slides down the brick wall, and swears soundly. "Oh sure, because your voice and your actions are so incredibly noticeable amidst massive gunfire. I'll be sure to remember to keep my watchful eye on you now...shit, that's not the last of our booze, is it?"

"I've got to sterilize this with something, now don't I?" says Vicious. Despite the terseness of his voice, he is very careful when he swabs his partner's leg with the whiskey. His moves are always very cutting, very precise, thinks Spike.

"I'll help you walk, but don't expect to be given a ride, asshole," says Vicious when he stands away from the wound, looking at Spike's disheveled hair with something that feels torn between disgust and remorse. "It's only because I was responsible for you on this one."

Spike smiles, and complains when appropriate as they walk, but in all honesty he just wants to lean into Vicious and pass the whiskey bottle between the two of them. Something in the smell of the liquor and the used clothing must of Vicious' coat just makes Spike want to fall asleep. (_You will be responsible for yourself after this, and Vicious will watch, and you will wish that you knew why whiskey and must always made your heart sink like an old clay vessel after the fact._)

* * *

03

Vicious always leaves.

"Fucking clean yourself up," he says with a sneer, and Spike smiles oafishly and insists that he doesn't need any fags trying to mother him. Vicious will smile in that offhanded way, like the wrenching of metal. (_It looks painful, like his teeth grate and __**break**__ under his forced affections_.) And then he will straighten his coat, step out the door, and disappear until the next time, which could be at any time.

It isn't that Spike wishes that Vicious wouldn't stay after a night of drinking and whoring like it was going out of style, when he can smell the pot, and sex, and opium rubbed into the cheap fabric of his sofa and think to himself 'well aren't these just the good times.' It was fun for the first thirty minutes, when it didn't feel so much like he was looking at the same broad, night after night to the point where he can count the number of freckles she has on her shoulders and how her eyes, no matter how broken in a whore she ought to be, spark with a secret delight when he mutters non-truths and petty compliments to her.

But he doesn't mind so much that it's always her face in his mind when he makes night calls. She fits, just so, like there was a pocket in his heart made just for her. He does not love her, but she'll suck him off and not think any less of him for it. She still responds to endearments like honey and doll, and in that Spike will always see her like a child's plaything (_just someone dust her off and take her home, and she'll be happy enough_).

Spike likes toys. He doesn't like to break them like his partner does, but he won't keep them either. "I don't need anything around here," he's said more than once. "All I need is the couch, the TV, and the refrigerator. If not, well fuck, I'll make do anyway."

Spike knows that when Vicious leaves, the hangovers will kick in, the harlots will want their money (_even soft doll ones_), and he'll be laying in his own vomit on the floor made of cheap linoleum. There will be no more beer, no more vodka, and nothing left for him to do other than sleep until someone wakes him up.

"How fulfilling," he's muttered to the ceiling from beneath the yellowed light of his kitchen. All that money, booze, and cunt, and he's still just as miserable as he was when he started.

"I am not allowed happiness," he tells himself after the girls leave, still holding his wallet between his fingers and a cigarette between his teeth. "I shoot people to pay for my apartment, where I will fuck women, tell them that I love them, and not mean it. I will drink cheap whiskey, shitty beer, and probably my own piss if left unsupervised for too long."

He never smokes for the exact same length of time, only as long as his impending unconsciousness will allow him. He stares, at a small spot on the wall where the drywall looks a bit like hands, but knows fully well that no one is here.

The reason Vicious always leaves, Spike thinks, is because no one wants to watch a full-grown man fall apart. (_Just because you can't hear or see it doesn't mean that it isn't happening_.)

* * *

04

He's not exactly sure why the movies make him so unaccountably sad, but either way, he finds himself sitting alone in a theater with no one but a few bags of stale popcorn and a corpse in the back row of the room. Spike doesn't like to mention how the bullet got into his head, but remembers the warm of the shot and the splatter on his face as though it were mere moments ago.

Of course, it was, but he doesn't like to go into little canonical differences in times like this.

The man hadn't been particularly rich or threatening, just a low-level drug dealer that occasionally enjoyed a film every once in a while. He only played classics on the screen, like some entrepreneur that considered themselves above what anyone else could see for a few dollars down the street. By the time that Audrey Hepburn had entered the cab to leave for South America, Spike had already created an entire backstory for the man.

"Your wife divorced you, ten, maybe twenty years ago when she discovered you with your under-aged lover. You were a professor then," Spike adds, as though this part were important. "It wasn't a very good college, and in all honesty had no use for a couple of cinema fags such as yourselves, but _someone _had to know what Clark Gable said to Scarlett O'Hara, or what it was that made Jack Nicholson so sad as Schmidt."

Spike, watching the silver screen pan over a rainy New York street (which just doesn't hold the same importance it might have then, but you desperately wish you could understand in this plasticine new world), taps the ashes from a cigarette to the floor.

"You went to Mars," he continues, "because you had nothing left for you. Well, maybe not, you had your young man, but he left when the university fired you. Sorry, he loved you for your movies and your cassettes. You opened a small theater with what was left of your own private collection here, but couldn't make ends meet. You were afraid, because if this didn't work out, then you had nowhere to go."

(_Strange, that sounds incredibly familiar, doesn't it?_)

"Selling drugs was easy," says Spike, "but there was still nothing here for you except some old tapes and a hundred old memories. Maybe you didn't want to sell drugs. Maybe you didn't want to run a theater. Maybe you just wanted to sit down, and watch to see if Audrey ever did find her cat in the crates. It's not like you had any reason to sell cokeheads a few lines, other than you might get shot."

"Lives are very cheap," Vicious intones from the doorway, as black and undefined in darkness as ever, "at least cheaper than drugs."

Spike rolls a joint, lights up, and salutes the man in back. "We're just a couple of old strays, you and I," he adds as a flourish. It's not as dramatic as rain in New York or marriage proposals in cabs, but Spike takes what romance he can get out of life, even if it does tend to appear from nowhere and rain on his parade.

When they leave the theater, Spike tries not to look at the white hair of the man he has killed and tell him all about how the movie ended.

* * *

05

Spike's front porch had always been small, but it was there, and that had to count for something when you wanted to watch the terraformed rain that was broadcast on the local news as though it were somehow surprising. There is no weather on planets such as these without prior warning. Sometimes he wonders if they just feign surprise to make it seem a little more real. (_But what is real anyway? You've never known anything other than the carefully manufactured clouds and water drops that the local government has made, -just for you-_.)

He doesn't remember when he stared smoking, today or any other day when he first started, but a new cigarette sits unlit between his lips like some sad branch. He pays it no mind until he hears the click click of boots on his stairway, moving through his rainy porch like those boots owned the place. Spike smiles and welcomes Vicious to his shithole.

"Bored?" the other asks. "Or are you just dirt poor and don't have any money to pay the usual ladies with?"

"Now, now," Spike chides," you know Nessa would come over here for free if I asked. I can make her scream all night and day even without the cash incentive."

"Bragging will get you nowhere with me, my friend," says Vicious, but nonetheless he brings his lighter out and holds it up to Spike's cigarette. "I don't suppose you have another one of these for me to jack off of you, do you?"

Spike takes a drag and sighs. "Nope. That was my last one, asshole. I had been saving it until we got paid tonight, but now that you've gone and lit it up, I suppose I'll just have to finish it, now won't I? But, if you ask nicely, you are more than welcome to share this one with me."

Vicious sneers, but plucks the cigarette from between Spike's fingers anyway. "Don't be selfish," he says. I'm the one who lit it, so it's half mine already." The smoke moves between his white teeth like sheets of web, and Spike almost has to stop himself from reaching across that great emptiness between them to brush them away. They have to keep each other clean, because no one else will. (_No one wants to be left on the shelf and thrown out for something better, something gold and bright and unlike the smoke webs and bloody clots you always seem to be fishing each other out of._)

The rain falls in sheets from the gutters of the building, and Spike and Vicious simply sit there, sharing the nicotine between the two of them. The only time either one of them gets close, it is only to steal the cigarette from one another. They both ignore that their feet are wet and that Spike will likely have a cold by the end of the week from sitting in damp clothing and that Vicious will have to make sure he doesn't get too sick, and that in all likelihood they will go out to kill someone else tonight as well, sniffles or not.

They do everything together.

Spike wonders all the while why they are so close but can never be as close as they ought to be.

* * *

A/N: This was all before Julia came. For those of you who didn't know, yes, Vicious/Spike is one of my oldest fandom pairings. The move that was talked about in part 4 was "Breakfast at Tiffany's" with Audrey Hepburn. Spike quotes her at the end.


End file.
